12/29/2020 - Shockingly, an update. I am looking forward to your thoughts! 3 computers later, and I've lost all my original notes. Some for the better (letter-burning - really? why would I do that?) and others for the worse (I miss that darn tapestry conversation). Next chapter to come in a few days.

Nostos

-11-

Eternal Night

T.A. 3019

12 March

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." - John Donne

"It comes from Mordor, lord… It began last night at sunset. From the hills in the Eastfold of your realm I saw it rise and creep across the sky, and all night as I rode it came behind eating up the stars. Now the great cloud hangs over all the land between here and the Mountains of Shadow; and it is deepening." (The Return of the King, The Muster of Rohan)

Hands close around her throat. Her knife is in hand; Dánaron's knife - but suddenly, it is gone, and the Corsair above me, a man of Umbar, is choking the life from her. Her world flashes and darkens; she perceives nothing except raw burning pain, her eyes strain, and she cannot breathe - where is her knife?

She is dying, and the fortress is going to explode, and -

"Princess Lothíriel?"

She jerked awake, gasping. Her chest burned. For a moment she could see still the Corsair. For a moment, she was still at Tolfalas.

Then her eyes cleared. She was in a small dark room. A woman hovered over her, lamp in hand.

"Poor dear," the woman crooned, "and no wonder, with the time you've had. I just came to tell you, the captain sent word that he rides in an hour. Will you have something to eat, before you go with him?"

She blinked. Her tongue felt furred and glued to the roof of her mouth. Lovely. "Oh - yes. Thank you."

She couldn't remember where they are. Lebennin? Yes, she thought so, to judge by the woman's accent.

She meets Captain Galcherdir and his men in the courtyard, saddling up. A hostler brings around a fresh horse for her. Galcherdir's large face is set and stern. He spares her a nod before they turn out.

They are a small company: all the men Captain Tercil could spare from the shattered garrison of Tolfalas - really, almost all the unwounded men. Malurust, always the malcontent, had argued against sending even these fifteen men.

"Captain, what if the Corsairs return?" he'd argued with Tercil. Lothiriel had squeezed into the back of the captain's sickroom, shocked at her good luck at being permitted into this all-male war council. She questioned her good luck when she had a look at the bandaged stump of his arm, though. The healer had been furious at this council of war, held over the sickbed of a man who, by rights, ought to be dead - or at the very least, recovering. But Tercil had been implacable. Tercil had even threatened to ride out himself, but it was patently obvious he wouldn't have made it further than ten miles, not with his wounds.

"If they return," Tercil had said, "it matters not. Tolfalas has no resistance to offer now. Take the men. They will do more good elsewhere."

"My captain," Galcherdir had said, saluting, doughy face set in determined, implacable lines. There was something majestic about him then.

So Galcherdir and his fifteen men, and Lothíriel, had set out for Minas Tirith. They rode along in implacable, unearthly darkness. They were all quiet, even these veteran soldiers.

They had done the impossible: they had held out against a massively overwhelming force of Corsairs, sailing up the Anduin towards Minas Tirith and the heart of Gondor. They had lost so many men, and those who remained would be scarred in mind and body.

At first Lothíriel had been grimly pleased. And then the darkness had come, like drifting smoke, blanketing the sky, until no dawn appeared, and they all realized: there was no end to night. It was ominous, an evil that shivered deep into blood and bone.

"Have you ever seen anything like this?" Lothíriel asked Galcherdir quietly.

"Oh, lass, it's not so bad as that," he said with forced cheer. And that, somehow, was more frightening than anything else.

The soldiers were for the most part kind to her. Some of them were long-serving Dol Amroth men who had known her brothers, and they spoke with warmth of her brother Erchirion. Her brother Elphir earned diplomatic praise for his sailing prowess, and her brother Amrothos was spoken of with warm smiles. Everyone likes Amrothos.

Except, apparently, for his sister.

As children they had told tales of monsters and shadow-worlds - told to frighten each other, send chills up their spines. It seemed to her that nothing could have been as terrifying as this world now, with the sun blotted from the sky, the world all turned to unshaking, soul-sucking darkness. You could feel it in your bones: the end of days.

And there was nothing like the end of days to make you rethink your life, and in those moments she hated herself, for her life spread before her like the pages of a book, and she did not like what she saw.

Amrothos. Elbereth, but what did I do to my own brother, she asked herself.

For she had condemned Amrothos for something that was not his fault - moreover, condemned him for who he loved. What kind of monster could do that?

As they rode through darkness she pushed on as good as the men, even as her legs and hips and spine threatened to snap in two from the long hours in the saddle, and in her head was one thought: I must tell him how sorry I am. I must tell him I was wrong, and he was right. Brother, I wronged you. I, who should have treasured you above all else.

Once, years ago, Lothíriel had nearly killed her brother. She had been the one who insisted on riding out with him, that fateful day, when his horse had tramped across a snake, shied, and threw him, breaking his leg and ending life as he knew it so dramatically.

Amrothos had never blamed her, though blame was deserved. Instead, when she'd been ushered into his bedchamber, he'd just reached for her and said, "There, now, sister. Don't cry. You see. I'm perfectly well."

After the accident, after her mother had died, she had vowed to herself: no more childish foolishness. No more antics. No more rebelliousness. She would be the lady her mother would have wanted; she would give up the childishness that had cost her brother so much. And somehow along that road she had come to care more about propriety and what people thought than her own family.

So she rode through dawnless days and hated herself.

But no, she must not hate herself. Dánaron would have something to say about that. Éomer would have something to say about that.

Éomer…

Don't think about him, she ordered herself. Don't think about him.

But she could not help but think of him. She had seen him in a dream - a dream of Dol Amroth, the kind her older brother Elphir had dreamt. She had known, the moment she stood in that strange-dream-world in her bones: this was a true dream. But she had dreamt of Boromir, and her beloved oldest cousin was dead.

Did this mean Eomer was gone? Or that he was riding off to death?

And she knew in that moment: I cannot live without Éomer. She cannot live without the memory of his smile, the kind words, the sense of unshaking strength, squeezed thin into parchment and ink.

Oh, good on you, Thiri, she can hear Amrothos say. Haven't seen the man in, what, decades, and you decide you can't live without him? Well done. Very well done.

They stopped for the evening outside a small town in Lossarnach, setting out bedrolls, picketing the horses. A handful of the men staredt fires. Galcherdir and another man went into town to gather news.

Lossarnach: when Éomer had come to see her, after her mother had died. He had taken her in her arms, and comforted her. It seemed that all the world was hung with reminders of those she loved, and that she might lose.

Was she a fool? I think I care for him, she told herself. She meant: I think I could love him. Could love a man she barely knew, a man she had seen only a handful of times in her life. But she knew him, knew him to the core. He had stood by her in the darkest times; his words, forced and uncertain as they were - he was no great writer - had buoyed her at her lowest. He had seen her, he had known her, and he had never turned away.

Galcherdir and his companion returned once the fires were blazing full and warm against the darkness.

"Minas Tirith is besieged," Galcherdir announced to them.

"Minas Tirith, besieged?" one of the men repeats. He is ashen-faced. "When?"

"Three days ago," Galcherdir said. "No news since."

"All could be lost," another man murmured. "Was it all for nothing? What of the Corsairs?"

But Galcherdir had no answer for them.

What will become of the siege may have already happened; they might be too late. They might be riding into inevitable defeat. Their loved ones might be dead; they might be riding to join them in death, too.

Someone said, "We ride on?"

And it was Lothíriel who said: "Yes, we ride on."

Galcherdir looked at her, and nodded.

That night, she did not dream, and in the morning, she woke, ready to face the world, whatever it held.